After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the 1920 Treaty of Sevres promised the Kurds their own state.  Unfortunately, those promises were never fulfilled; what was to have been Kurdistan was instead divided up between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.  The Kurds are neither Turks nor Arabs; they trace their descent from the Medes, Persian nomads who inhabited the region over 3,000 years ago.  This has not stopped Turks or Arabs from claiming the Kurds as their own … or from brutally repressing any signs of Kurdish culture. 

At first Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party enjoyed reasonably good relations with Iraq’s Kurdish population.  In 1970, a wideranging agreement with the Kurdish rebel groops granted the Kurds the right to use and broadcast their language, and gave them considerable political autonomy.  Things broke down after the Ba'ath Party embarked on the “Arabization” of Kurdistan’s oil-producing areas.  Kurdish farmers were evicted from their homes by Iraqi troops and replaced with Arabs, while Kurdish placenames were replaced with Arabic ones. This led to a fullscale war in 1974, during which some 130,000 Kurds fled to Iran.  In 1975 nearly 100,000 Kurds were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to barren sites in the desert south of Iraq.  The government created a “security belt” near the Turkish and Iranian borders, moving out the Kurds and summarily executing any who tried to return.  

During the bloody Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988, more than a few Kurds remembered the old Kurdish proverb: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  Alas, Kurdish culture has always been tribal, and, as with most tribal cultures, inter-tribal warfare was a common occurrence.  Both Iran and Iraq took advantage of Kurdish infighting to promote dissent:  Iraq funded Iraqi Kurdish communists, while Iran funded Kurdish peshmerge (guerrillas) in Iran.  As the long conflict ground to a close, Hussein used “Kurdish treachery” as an excuse to solve the Kurdish problem once and for all, through an organized plan of mass murder codenamed “Anfal.”

These operations started characteristically with chemical attacks from the air on both civilian and peshmerge targets, accompanied by a military blitz against the Kurdish military bases. After this initial assault, ground troops enveloped the target areas from all sides, destroying all human habitation in their path, looting household possessions and farm animals and setting fire to homes, before calling in demolition crews.  Once the survivors were rounded up and transported away, the mass executions began.  According to Middle East Watch, a human rights group:

“Some groups of prisoners were lined up, shot from the front and dragged into pre-dug mass graves; others were shoved roughly into trenches and machine gunned where they stood; others were made to lie down in pairs, sardine-style, next to mouths of fresh corpses, before being killed; others were tied together, made to stand on the lip of the pit, and shot in the back so that they would fall forward into it - a method that was presumably more efficient from the point of view of the killers. Bulldozers then pushed earth or sand loosely over the heaps of corpses. Some of the gravesites contained dozens of separate pits, and obviously contained the bodies of thousands of victims. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the executioners were uniformed members of the Ba'th Party, or perhaps of Iraq's General Security Directorate.”

By 1990 it is estimated that some 300,000 Iraqi Kurds had been killed outright, and another 600,000 displaced.  While reports of Iraqi atrocities were slowly reaching the world press, there was little international outcry:  indeed, many intellectuals denied that Iraq was using chemical weapons, while one War College report attempted to pin the blame for chemical warfare on Iran.  Emboldened by this silence, Hussein decided to settle yet another border dispute by force, and in 1990 invaded Kuwait, thereby precipitating the Gulf War and a decade of sanctions against his country.  While he was our ally, or the enemy of our enemy Iran, we had turned a blind eye to his usage of poison gas.  After the invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. government released details of atrocities against the Kurds, and used them as justification for our “just war” against a dangerous tyrant.